3.5/5 ★ – musitive's review of Bō: Path of the Teal Lotus.

I'll start off by saying that I wish the devs well. Losing their publisher can't have been easy. From the sounds of it, it has made pushing out updates difficult as well. That being said, my thoughts are based on the game as it was when I played it. I have torn feelings on Bō: Path of the Teal Lotus. On the one hand, it borrows far too much from games like Celeste and Hollow Knight that comparisons to those games are far too easy to make. I consider those games masterpieces, so the issues in this game are glaring, even if the rest of the game is well polished. On the other hand, because the developers understand a good amount of what makes those games great, they have a great jumping off point for their game. Mechanically, Bō controls a lot like the knight from Hollow Knight. Speed, acceleration, and little details feel identical. So much so that the differences feel unnatural. It's my own fault, but I kept trying to pogo spikes like Hollow Knight, or rely on Hollow Knight's dash distance and speed. The one mechanic that seemed unique to me that was incredibly fun was the aerial combat. Hitting an enemy or certain objects will give you a bit of extra height as well as reset both your jump and dash. This allows for a lot of fun sequence breaks and smooth traversal of the map. The most frustrating part of Bō is that the developers really seem to understand specific moments in those games that were fun and how to recreate them, but not how to lead up to them (in my opinion). I can think of two very clear examples of this, though I recall it happening many times throughout my experience. 1. (Minor spoilers) The final boss is very reminiscent of Absolute Radiance in Hollow Knight. In fact, it almost feels like a Hollow Knight boss instead of a Bō boss. It may even have the same number of phases as Absolute Radiance. It's actually a fun fight, but nothing in the 10+ hours before this fight prepared me for it. The build up to the fight is actually quite easy. You know what did prepare me for this fight? The 100+ hours I spent playing Hollow Knight; and at least half of those were spent mastering the combat boss-by-boss in the God Home DLC fighting bosses. 2. (More minor spoilers - including Celeste spoilers) One of the end game sequences is just the Badeline bossfight during penultimate level of Celeste. But it just kind of appears out of nowhere in this game? I probably died 10K+ times doing everything in Celeste, rarely getting frustrated. I probably died only a handful of times during this sequence in Bō, but I could feel myself getting frustrated. The other platforming segments did not feel like they prepared me for this. Celeste feels like it prepared me for this. I could perhaps understand the argument that Bō is meant for hardcore platforming and metroidvania fans IF the entire game provided that level of difficulty. However, that's not the case. Instead, the game design, level design, and combat encounters feel very disjointed. The strongest element of Bō is the art direction. Each area and character design is simply beautiful. Bō itself seems a bit too similar in design to the knight in Hollow Knight, but with some interesting color choices to stand apart. Bō: Path of the Teal Lotus is certainly not a bad game, but I wish it was longer with a better sense of progression. I feel like there were more ideas to explore with it's well polished aerial platforming and combat, but relied too much on elements that made other games great. I hope that the developers introduce more of their own unique ideas in future projects. They certainly have the talent to make something great!